The rise of NFTs and the culture around them has solidified its place amongst the crypto market. In 2021 we saw the biggest year for NFTs thus far with total secondary NFT sales in the billions. Today that number is roughly 67 Billion. This rapid expansion has shown us that the potential for NFTs to be mass adopted is not at all a far-fetched idea — in fact it is entirely possible. We have seen mainstream companies join in on the market, among the names are some of the biggest companies such as Nike, Adidas, NBA and the list goes on with more and more companies allocating major budgets for NFT R&D. The success of collections like CryptoPunks and BAYC trading thousands of ETH on a daily basis has enticed a lot of attention, and the technology behind the NFT is easily understandable, making them the perfect digital collectible assets. Moreover, the user base has grown from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands in just 2021, and has the potential of growing to millions of users.
So what is stopping this from happening if everything sounds like it’s perfect? Why have we not seen the user base grow and become accessible to everyone? The problem lies with chains such as Ethereum, which hosts a plethora of blue chip NFTs. ETH has not been able to efficiently handle all the success it has seen. With fluctuating gas prices on ETH, the fees to mint an NFT could end up costing more than the NFT itself, resulting in the general public with low amounts of capital with limited points of entry. This leads to people and firms with large amounts of capital to continue to mint and profit from popular mints and collections.The inefficiencies of Ethereum are clear as day, thus creating a need for a blockchain dedicated to catering the demands of NFT marketplaces and communities where everyone has a fair opportunity to participate in mints and a chain that focuses on pushing NFT development to its full potential.
A Solution
Aura Network an NFT-centric blockchain platform, that aims to expand the limits of NFTs currently seen within the cryptocurrency and web3 space, through integrating and adding solutions that help introduce the use of NFTs across additional and existing industries. Aura Network’s vision is to create a one-stop destination for minting, evaluating, querying, and transacting NFTs, by providing infrastructure that helps foster and nurture the whole NFT ecosystem as a whole, from minters, to secondary buyers and to collection creators. This can be seen through the implementation of features and products within the Aura ecosystem shown below.
The Aura ecosystem can be split and divided into 4 different layers: Infrastructure, Currency, dApps, and OpenApi, with each layer providing different value to ecosystem players and providing Aura with the ability to achieve its goal of becoming the one-stop destination for NFTs. Firstly, Infrastructure within Aura networks consists of all the resources relating to the underlying blockchain platform, and includes the node client Aurad as well as genesis blocks, configuration files, IBC and deployed services serving Aura Network, allowing Aura Network to help maximize interoperability through its infrastructure.
Aura Network has 2 native currencies within its ecosystem: Aura Coin and Aura Token. Aura Token can be seen as a placeholder that is first issued on Binance Smart Chain, with the ability to convert to Aura Coin when the Aura Network Mainnet launches. Once released, Aura Coin will be mainly used for paying transaction fees, with other services such as staking, providing liquidity, and governance benefits. Aura also supports creating CW20 tokens, similar to other blockchains that use the CosmWasm module.dApps within Aura Network aims to offer and provide a strong user experience for past users within the DeFi and NFT space, ensuring a smooth transition from other chains to Aura Network itself. Aura Network will introduce key dApps to ensure growth of its NFT ecosystem, such as its very own native NFT marketplace for efficient trading of NFTs, a blockchain explorer with extra features for governing and staking, a playground for developers to test contracts, a NFT Hub for the Aura community to interact, and other features that aim to build out Aura Network’s main vision. Finally, applications building on Aura Network are required to provide standard open APIs for the public, ensuring that querying from a blockchain ledger becomes significantly easier, as standards are aligned. This is made possible through the Aura Indexer, which is a comprehensive project where Aura Network is able to process every blockchain transaction and state data in every block and store results in a NoSQL database for better query handling. The indexer also provides identical APIs with the node RPC so clients don’t have to change their existing API call, therefore making it compatible with other Cosmos based blockchain.
The combination of the four layers discussed above allows Aura Network to provide its users with 3 main features:
- A universal framework for all stakeholders to create a one stop destination for developing new NFT use cases
- A multi-chain platform that can support both crypto communities and traditional businesses
- An infrastructure layer for building and integrating your applications to the metaverse
Aura Network’s core team started the network in October of last year, with a significant emphasis on developing Aura Network with over 50 software developers and 12 back end developers. Together, the core team makes up a vast amount of experience ranging from web2 and web3 companies and start-ups. Giang Tran, Aura Network’s main founder, drives Aura Network’s strategy and growth, and is a member of Forbes Technological Council, with significant expertise within cloud and blockchain technology. Together with the team’s qualified developers, it provides Aura Network with a great opportunity to continue building towards its roadmap.
Aura Network currently plans on ensuring that the main and basic dApps are implemented and fully functional during its release, with continuous innovation to improve the user experience for users within those dApps. As Aura Network continues to develop, the team plans on focusing and developing various NFT use cases related to both SocialFi and GameFi by 2022, thus allowing Aura to be seen as one of the main networks that helps develop and nurture the ecosystem surrounding NFTs. Finally, Aura Network believes in a multi-chain future, and will focus on developing bridges to other networks and metaverse connectors.
Aura Token Sale on Impossible Finance
- Total Token Supply: 1,000,000,000 AURA
- Launchpad Sale Hard Cap: USD750,000 (split into multiple pools)
- Standard pool: 390,000 (60%)
- Unlimited pool: 260,000 (40%)
- Whitelist allocation: 100,000 - Token Vesting: 100% distributed on day 1
- Listing Price: US$0.065
Executing on the Roadmap
As of April, Aura Network has successfully launched its 2 main testnets for dApp testing, namely Serenity and Halo. Both are tightly controlled networks with a limited number of validators controlled by the Aura team and some other partners.
In order to create a close resemblance to its mainnet, Aura Network has announced to release its Staging Network with the code name of Euphoria. This new environment will be equipped with latest features for external validators bootstrapping, vesting, voting, etc., aiming to become a near exact replica of Aura mainnet. The Euphoria staging network has been launched as of July 13, 2022, further cementing their roadmap execution.
Closing statement on Aura Network
Aura Network is a huge contender and it stands to make the biggest impact on the NFT market with its versatile platform as Ethereum did with its ERC721 and ERC115 Token standards. The NFT market desperately needs Aura Network to push the envelope forward and become a mass adopted, mainstream NFT Platform. We have outlined the features and applications of the Aura Network, and we are extremely thrilled and cannot wait to see Aura continue to execute their roadmap and blow the industry away.
